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Thursday, November 15, 2012

Morell's Testimony Today

Hat tip Town Hall

Town Hall is reporting that acting CIA director Michael Morell told Congress today that Susan Rice was provided with the initial intelligence (that later turned out to be erroneous) when she appeared on news shows five days after the attack.

Rice may be eventually somewhat vindicated here, but we still don't know why the administration would send her ( of all people) out there with the video-protest line when intelligence knew within 24 hours this was no protest gone out of control. State Department officials were monitoring it in real time.

Even before Morell appeared today, CBS released a report that the talking points given to Rice never mentioned terrorism. (Hat tip Hot Air)

So was Susan Rice simply a dupe for the administration who had no inside details of how the attack occurred? It is curious that the administration sent the UN ambassador to the news shows instead of someone like Petraeus, Tom Donilon or James Clapper. Was it their opinion at the time Rice was speaking that the Benghazi attack was simply a protest gone wild? Would they have told the news shows the same line on September 16?

Here from Town Hall is an update on Saxby Chambliss' (R-GA) reaction to viewing the real time video of the attack:

2 comments:

The lesson in all this is that people with responsible public posts should stop reacting to news vultures who want instant sound bytes, admit that they don't have their fingertips on complete and fully verified comprehensive information, and provide a decent overview of events when they have it. Meantime, they should be focused on the job at hand, not on satisfying either eager reporters or partisan bloggers.

If everyone had ignored the news media, perhaps another life or two might have been saved with the time devoted to identifying appropriate next steps instead of trying to offer explanations.

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Roger Gardner of Radarsite (1936-2009)

About Me

Born 1945 in Los Angeles. Currently employed since 1998 as adjunct teacher at University of California at Irvine Ext. teaching English as a second language.
Served three years in US Army at Erlangen, Germany 1966-68.
1970-1973- Criminal Investigator with US Customs
1973-1995 Criminal investigator with Drug Enforcement Administration. Stationed in Los Angeles, Bangkok, Milan, Italy, Pittsburgh and Office of Training, FBI Academy, Quantico, Va until retirement. Author of Erlangen-An American's History of a German Town-University Press of America 2005.